Snacks That Only Existed in the 1960s

Close your eyes and walk down the snack aisle with me — not the one at your store today, the one from when you were small enough to ride in the cart. Remember it? The boxes came up to your chin, the colors practically shouted at you, and every few weeks something brand new appeared on the shelf that had never existed before in the history of the world. You’d tug on your mother’s sleeve and point, and she’d say “put it back,” and you’d beg, and sometimes — oh, sometimes — she’d sigh and drop it in the cart. That sigh was the sweetest sound in America.

That aisle had a habit, though. So much of what filled it simply vanished, and it vanished fast. You’d go looking for a box you’d loved all spring and find the shelf space already given to something else, and nobody ever explained why. Well, today I’m going to explain why. Grab a cup of coffee and come sit with me, because we’re going back for nine of them.

1. Corn Flakes & Strawberries

Let’s start with the one that started it all. In 1963, Post gave us Corn Flakes & Strawberries — the very first cereal with freeze-dried fruit in the box. It sounded like a miracle, didn’t it? Strawberries, in winter, right there with your flakes. The trouble was the berries themselves. Dry, they were like little corks. Wet, they went mushy and stuck to the roof of your mouth (tell me you don’t remember prying one loose with your tongue). Post pressed on anyway, adding peaches in 1963 and blueberries in 1965, but the strawberry version was pulled around 1965, and by 1967 Post had lost about $12 million on freeze-dried fruit. That’s a lot of corks.

2. Corn Flakes with Instant Bananas

Kellogg’s watched all that and thought, we can do better — with bananas. In 1964 out came Corn Flakes with Instant Bananas, and they didn’t fool around: they hired Jimmy Durante, who reworked “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” a song he’d been singing for years, just for the commercials. Sales were brisk for a few months, and then they simply collapsed. Grocers said it tasted like cardboard discs in a box, and the banana slices, I’m sorry to say, looked like communion wafers and turned brown in the milk. Kellogg’s quit in 1966; one executive said they’d tested the market carefully, tried, failed, and were getting out. And when they asked Durante to switch over to plain Corn Flakes ads? He refused flat out: “No bananas, no Durante.” A man of principle, that one.

3. Kream Krunch

Now here’s one I’d bet money you begged for. Kellogg’s Kream Krunch, 1965: oat rings plus actual chunks of freeze-dried ice cream, the very same stuff sold today as astronaut ice cream, in vanilla, strawberry and orange. Ice cream in your cereal bowl before school, and your mother handing it over without an argument. The chunks were supposed to stay crunchy in the milk. Instead they dissolved into a gluey mess in about a minute, and children all over the country stopped eating halfway through the bowl. Parents demanded refunds. It was gone within about a year, and no cereal company has tried it since. Some dreams only get one chance.

4. Bugles, Whistles, Daisys, Buttons and Bows

Did you know Bugles had a whole family? General Mills test-marketed Bugles in 1965, and in early 1966 they launched the entire clan nationally: Whistles (little tubes), Daisys (shaped like flowers, and weren’t they darling), Buttons (cheddar), and Bows (popcorn-flavored, of all things). We wore the Bugles on our fingertips like witch’s nails — you did too, don’t pretend — and then, one by one, the siblings disappeared. Buttons and Bows were gone by 1969, Daisys in 1970, Whistles in 1972. Only Bugles survives, the last one standing at the family reunion.

5. Nabisco Flings

Fancy company coming over? In 1966 Nabisco had just the thing: Flings, a puffed snack closer to a cheese puff than a chip, and here was the clever part, they sold it in a stand-up box rather than a bag, so you could set them right out on the table for guests, which my mother considered very sophisticated. The flavors were Cheese, Chicken, and Ham and Swiss (yes, chicken-flavored puffs, and the sixties were brave that way). They flung themselves right onto coffee tables across America, and then straight into memory. Nabisco tried again in 1984, in a bag that time, and failed again. Some snacks just aren’t meant to come back, no matter how nicely you dress them.

6. Shake-A Pudd’n

Oh, this one. Royal Shake-A Pudd’n ran its first commercial in 1966, and it was really a science project you were allowed to eat. The carton held four cups, four lids, four spoons, and four packets of mix. You added water, snapped the lid on, shook it for about thirty seconds like your life depended on it, then waited five long minutes for it to set. (The waiting was agony, and the shaking was the whole point.) The commercials had a surf-music tune built entirely on the word “shake,” and they ended with a boy declaring, “What a crazy way to make dessert.” He wasn’t wrong. Royal dropped it in 1971, and Jell-O carried the idea along for a few years as Shake-A-Pudding, but the party was over.

7. Funny Face

Pillsbury came after Kool-Aid in 1964 with Funny Face drink mixes, and say what you will, they had the best names in the business: Goofy Grape, Loud Mouth Lime, Freckle Face Strawberry, Rootin’ Tootin’ Raspberry. Mind you, the original lineup had six characters, and the two I haven’t named were ethnic caricatures, one of a Native American and one of a Chinese man. Pillsbury renamed both within a few years, and that’s how we got Jolly Olly Orange and Choo Choo Cherry. Those goofy mugs grinned at us from the packet, and the mix came pre-sweetened with cyclamate, and that’s where the trouble started. In October 1969, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare announced that cyclamate posed a cancer risk, and it was banned in consumer products effective February 1, 1970. Pillsbury took a multi-million dollar loss. The brand did come back later with other sweeteners, but for those of us who remember, Goofy Grape never grinned quite the same.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, cyclamate was cleared in the end. The FDA’s own Cancer Assessment Committee looked again in 1985 and concluded it wasn’t a carcinogen after all, and the National Academy of Sciences agreed. More than fifty countries permit the stuff today. So did we ever lift our ban? We never did, which leaves Goofy Grape sitting in the penalty box all these years for a crime he didn’t commit.

8. Fizzies

The oldest soul on this list, and maybe the most magical. Fizzies were invented by Lem Billings around 1954 and became popular in the later 1950s: you dropped a tablet in a glass of water and watched it foam up into grape, root beer or cherry. It was a magic trick and a beverage in one. What killed it was the very same cyclamate ruling that got Funny Face. Warner-Lambert pulled Fizzies fast, spent the early 1970s trying to work out a legal formula, decided nothing tasted good enough, and quit. They’d rather stop than serve us something second-rate — and honestly, I respect that.

9. Space Food Sticks

I’ve saved the best story for last. NASA asked for a food an astronaut could eat with his helmet on, and Pillsbury answered with a soft, chewy rod: the Space Food Stick. They were carried on Apollo 11 as contingency food when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on July 20, 1969, and on the missions that followed. And on Apollo 13, after the landing was scrapped and the crew nursed that wounded ship home, the sticks went onto the daily menu. Meanwhile, down here on Earth, they showed up in grocery stores from 1969, fourteen sticks to a box, in flavors including chocolate, caramel and peanut butter. Every kid who ate one at recess was, for that moment, halfway to the moon. They lasted into the 1980s, and a small company even revived them in 2006. Not bad for a snack, landing on the moon before most of us made it out of our home state.

Why They All Came at Once

Ever wonder why the sixties, of all decades, gave us this parade of strange and wonderful food? There’s a reason for it. Freeze-drying came out of wartime and space research and got handed to the food companies before anyone knew whether it actually made breakfast better, so they simply tried it and let us find out. Saturday morning television delivered a room full of children, sitting cross-legged in their pajamas, ready to be sold to (and boy, were we sold to). And the space race made laboratory food sound like the future instead of a warning. Then the 1970s arrived with tighter ingredient rules, and the party quietly ended. For one shining decade, though, the snack aisle was the most exciting place in town.

Now it’s your turn. Which one of these did you beg for? Did your mother ever say yes to the Kream Krunch, or did you shake a Pudd’n cup until your arm ached? Tell me all about it in the comments below, because I read every single one, and I’ll bet your memory is even better than mine.

Image credits: Bugles photo by Geoff via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Fizzies tablets via 1950sUnlimited on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). Fizzies store display courtesy of The Library of Virginia (no known restrictions). Apollo 11 lunar surface photograph courtesy of NASA.